^Problems of 
The ZS(eyp Christianity 



E. M. LAWRENCE GOULD 




Book ■ ( ~ < 7 . 

Gopiglit'N . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT! 



PROBLEMS OF 
THE NEW CHRISTIANITY 






Problems of 
The 3\(ew Qhristianity 



BY 

E. M. LAWRENCE GOULD 

EDITOR OF " THE NEW-CHURCH MESSENGER " 
AUTHOR OF " SON OF GOD AND SON OF MAN," 



WITH INTRODUCTION 

BY 

JOHN GODDARD 



THE NEW-CHURCH PRESS 
NEW YORK 






COPYRIGHTED, 1922, BY 
THE NEW-CHURCH BOARD OF PUBLICATION 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 



APR 1 7 I922 
©CLA661361 



To a Group 

MISUNDERSTOOD AND NOT INFREQUENTLY MALIGNED 

FOR WHOM I HAVE A DEEP AFFECTION 

AND IN WHOSE FUTURE I HAVE AN 

UNSHAKABLE CONFIDENCE — 

The Younger Generation of Today 



FOREWORD 

The following pages embody in outline an 
answer to the great fundamental questions of 
religion and the future life. They were pre- 
pared and delivered in the usual course of 
pulpit ministration, but were also designed to 
meet a broader need than is usually felt in 
our churches. Through association with Mr. 
Gould I have known of his great desire to 
answer the questions of thinking people, 
especially of young men as yet unsettled in 
their religious convictions — to appeal not 
only to "the man in the street," or to men as 
we find them, but to all honest minds, well 
disposed toward, unconvinced by, or skeptical 
of the former Christian teachings — to supply 
a rational basis for their faith, such as the 
New-Church revelation offers. 

This is a task great enough for any man. 
The present freedom of the human mind, 
vii 



FOREWORD 

absolved so largely from the past bondage of 
fear and superstition, together with the grow- 
ing conviction that religion is character, good 
living, good will, opens a wide door of oppor- 
tunity to one who loves and who is fitted for 
this broader work. Mr. Gould seems espe- 
cially adapted for it, not only by inclination 
and training, by clearness of thought and 
diction, but also by the fact that, during the 
war and since the armistice, he has been closely 
associated with young men in the service. The 
dangers and sufferings of the soldiers and 
sailors who took an active part in the war tend 
to bring to the fore these great questions of 
life and death, and I have much sympathy 
with Mr. Gould's strong desire to meet such 
questions with that form of truth which not 
only satisfies the intellect, but appeals also 
to those deepest affections whose germinal 
forms have been implanted in the earliest 
stages of life by the angels of infancy who 
"always behold the face of my Father." 
It will be the duty of the New-Church 
viii 



FOREWORD 

teachers of the next generations, while not 
neglecting the needs of the individual, to apply 
the thought of the perfect love of God as 
revealed in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ 
to the practical conditions of the world — to 
supplement the words of the prayer, "Thy will 
be done, as in heaven, so upon the earth,' ' 
by pointing and leading the way to its ful- 
filment — to carry this missionary message 
to all the world. And to this work we hope 
and believe that the author of the present 
volume may be a successful and an honored 
contributor. 

John Goddard 
Newtonviixe, Mass. 
March 16, 1922 



IX 



I Who or What Is God? 
II Can God Speak With Men? 

III Do Men Dm? 

IV What Is the Religious Life? 



I 

WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

In the beginning God created the heavens 
and the earth. (Gen. i, i.) 

And Jesus came and spake unto them, 
saying, All power is given unto me in 
heaven and on earth. (Matt, xxviii, 18) 

THIS is, as we are so frequently re- 
minded, an age of rapid and perva- 
sive change. The material conditions, and 
with them the economic, social, intellectual, 
even the moral structure of human life as 
it has long been known are in a state of most 
bewildering flux. Nothing seems altogether 
fixed or stable. In the world of ideas, hardly 
a principle that has for generations been re- 
garded as established but has had to meet 
with criticism, if it has not actually been 
denied. 

i 



WHO — OR WHAT-IS GOD? 

Humanly speaking, that which lies be- 
hind this "great unrest " is the world spread 
of the spirit of democracy. From the be- 
ginning of history until almost within our 
recollection, the main factor in most people's 
lives was one kind or another of authority. 
It was the habit of the average man in the 
average situation to do as he was told. Nor 
did this seem at all strange to him, since his 
associates and his forbears, in their turn, 
had quite unquestioningly done likewise. 
It was not just a matter of action, either; 
it was just as true of thought. For genera- 
tion after generation men were told by 
those who happened to be in authority 
not only what they should do, but what they 
should believe. They believed — as they 
acted — blindly. 

If the established authorities of church 
and state had been willing to keep within 
the bounds of reason, this state of affairs 
might have kept on indefinitely, and we 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

might today be living in a continuation of 
the Dark Ages. But — fortunately, as it 
turned out — they were not. First in the 
church, the intellectual honesty of men like 
Martin Luther and his fellow reformers was 
forced into reluctant rebellion, and political 
rebellion followed after. Slowly, but gather- 
ing strength like wildfire, the spirit of indi- 
vidualism swept over western Europe till it 
caught even in the remote American colo- 
nies. And here first in modern times there 
was set up a nation consciously committed 
to the principle that authority rests not upon 
Divine right but upon the consent of the 
governed. So contagious was the American 
example that it has changed the whole social 
and political face of the world; so that today 
men everywhere demand the right to govern 
themselves and to think for themselves. The 
days of authority and obedience are forever 
ended. 
This tremendous change has made or will 

3 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

ultimately make it necessary for human 
life to be recast from top to bottom. Noth- 
ing can remain quite as it was, for every- 
thing must be re-established upon the new 
foundation of democracy. This does not 
mean that all that was worth while in th° 
old ways of living will be lost. Indeed, all 
that was really good will finally be kept, 
or be returned to. But the good old things 
will be retained for a new reason. In a 
good many ways we shall still follow tradi- 
tion, but no longer simply because it is 
tradition; it will be because it seems to 
men's impartial, reasonable judgment to be 
worth the following. And this will be as 
true in religious matters as in any others. 
Our religious conceptions must, like all the 
rest, be re-examined, re-tested, re-valued 
and in many instances re-stated so as to meet 
the needs of a new age. I earnestly believe 
that, whatever else may be abandoned, the 
world will and must retain Christianity, but 

4 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD ? 

it will not be the Christianity of the autocra- 
tic ages. That which must come — and is, 
indeed, already coming — is a new Chris- 
tianity, deeper, fuller, richer, truer and more 
reasonable than the faith of any previous 
generation. 

Such a Christianity, I say, is even now in 
process of development. It is not limited 
by the bounds of organization, but is found 
in men of all denominations and of none. 
It is affecting all denominations; for where 
is the church which will today accept, with- 
out reinterpretation, the creeds and dogmas 
even of a generation ago? Yet the estab- 
lishment of the new Christianity is no easy 
task, as every forward looking minister or 
church worker knows. A rational examina- 
tion of the fundamentals of religion raises 
problems which cannot be solved without 
the most earnest effort and the utmost open- 
mindedness. It is my effort in what follows 
to do what I can toward carrying on this 

5 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

work, and my awareness of my personal 
inadequacy finds its compensation in the 
fact that the ideas which I shall try to ex- 
press are not my own, but came from one 
who has been called "the greatest mind 
since Aristotle/ ' the great Swedish scien- 
tist, philosopher and theologian, Emanuel 
Swedenborg. In the light of his teaching 
— or, as I believe, of God's own teaching 
through him — I shall approach the prob- 
lems which are to be considered in this 
little book. 

What is the first and greatest problem 
which the new Christianity must face, and 
to which it must somehow find an answer 
suited to the present age? Since the chief 
aim of all religion is to set up a right relation 
between men and God, the problem is in- 
evitably that of God Himself. Until the 
churches have at least substantially agreed 
as to the nature of God, who is at once the 
subject and the avowed source of their 
6 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

message, there can never be a real growth of 
religion or a general acceptance of it by the 
world. God, the Creator of the universe, 
whose laws are its laws and by whose life 
it lives — is He in any sense a person, so 
that we can say, "Who is He?" or was 
creation but the work of an unknown, im- 
personal First Cause or Creative Energy? 
Who — or what — is God? 

There is, of course, the prior question 
whether there is any God at all, but that is 
one on which we need not spend much time. 
On those who can be satisfied to explain 
the universe by saying that it "happened" 
or "evolved," an argument is generally 
wasted. If we exclude all but the evidence 
of sense, then certainly the fact of God can- 
not be proved. But if the evidence of reason 
is considered, then it must be evident at least 
that all this something did not come from 
nothing, for "from nothing, nothing comes." 
No one has ever yet seen an effect without 
7 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

a cause, which was in turn the effect of some 
preceding cause. So a First Cause has been 
and is the postulate of all reasonable think- 
ing about the phenomena of existence. 

There is one other simple, rational prin- 
ciple which is fundamental to our thinking. 
If "from nothing, nothing comes, ,, it must 
be likewise true that the less cannot cause 
or generate the greater. Where, if not from 
nothing, could the added greatness come 
from? Therefore we must assume that 
everything in the wide range of human ex- 
perience has or has had a cause as great as 
if not greater than itself; and that the First 
Cause is as great as, if not greater than the 
sum of all that has been, is, or can be. And, 
since there is no known limit to what can be, 
therefore the First Cause is itself without 
limit, or infinite. Thus the first rational 
conclusion from a study of the universe is 
that there must be an infinite First Cause. 

Since the less cannot create the greater, 
8 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

i 

the First Cause — or God — must be at least 
equal to the highest known form of existence. 
The highest form of material existence is 
the rather mysterious thing we know as 
force or energy. This, indeed, not only 
underlies but constitutes all matter, for if 
matter is analysed it breaks up into elemental 
atoms, which in turn resolve themselves into 
electrons. And these, scientists define as 
" points of force." There is, however, a 
form of existence which is higher than 
material energy — which can modify, con- 
trol and direct energy to its own purposes. 
This higher power is the soul or personality of 
man, operating through the activity of his will 
and intelligence. The soul is at least in 
part superior to any power outside itself. 
Nothing controls it that is not even more 
controlled by it. Therefore we may say that 
soul, or personality, is the highest known or 
conceivable form of being. 
This being the case, and since (once more) 

9 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

the less cannot create the greater, it must 
follow that the Creator of personality must 
himself possess it — that God must be, in 
some sense at least, a Person. Is it con- 
ceivable, really, that an unconscious force 
could create the conscious soul of man? 
God is a Person, and possessed of the essen- 
tial attributes of personality, active will and 
active intelligence. Or you may say that 
He consists in will and intelligence united 
in activity. Thus His essential nature is 
threefold, which led the wise men of old 
time to speak of Him as a Trinity; yet He 
is not a trinity of persons but a Trinity in 
a Person. 

The next question must be that of the 
moral character of God's will and intelli- 
gence. Here the answer lies in the simple 
fact that the moral sense exists in man, a 
being whom He created. If man is or can be 
good, then God must be infinitely good. If 
man's thoughts can be true, God's must be 
10 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD ? 

infinitely so. I shall assume the agreement 
of most thinking people at the present time 
to the proposition that the essence of moral 
goodness is unselfish love. Therefore we may 
describe the will of God as Infinite Love 
and His Intelligence as Infinite Wisdom. 
These two, with their unceasing joint acti- 
vity for the ultimate well-being of all created 
things, make up the true and infinite Trinity 
— Love, the Father; Wisdom, born of Love, 
the Son; and the activity of both together 
the Holy Spirit. 

Now the conception of an all-powerful, 
infinitely wise and loving God must face 
one really serious objection — the fact of 
the existence in the universe of moral evil. 
I say "moral evil/' though in point of fact 
there is no other. Evil is not a physical but 
a moral quality, and cannot properly be 
predicated of material things. Material na- 
ture has no quality of good or evil; it is no 
more "cruel" (as men sometimes call it) 
ii 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD ? 

than it is kind. Its forces all exist for useful 
ends, and all are useful when they are not 
misapplied. But in the spirit of man the 
quality of moral evil does exist, and has ex- 
pressed itself from the beginning in innumer- 
able ways; and there are many thoughtful 
people to whom this fact seems to cast a doubt 
on the existence of the kind of God Chris- 
tianity has taught us to believe in. I will 
say even that the problem of evil is incom- 
parably the most difficult that religion has 
to face. The most satisfactory answer to 
it that I know is given by Swedenborg in 
his book on "The Divine Providence," and 
I can only try to give you a brief outline of 
its teaching. 

In the first place, while evil has a very 
real existence, practically speaking, it exists 
in quite a different sense from goodness. 
For, like all negations, it exists only relatively 
to the thing which it denies. Evil is not a 
thing in itself; it is either the absence or 

12 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD ? 

the perversion of goodness. In the former 
case, it is exactly parallel with physical cold. 
Experimentally and to sensation, cold exists, 
but it is not a thing, as heat is; it is simply 
absence of heat. When an object has less 
heat than its surroundings, or than our 
bodies, then we call it cold. But we do not 
say, because there are some objects that 
are relatively cold, that heat does not exist or 
is a failure. Neither does the fact that there 
are people who are relatively evil prove 
that goodness is a failure. It means simply 
that the work of goodness has not yet been 
finished. It cannot be finished in the nature 
of things so long as new people are contin- 
ually coming into being; for they must first 
be created before the operation of God's love 
can make them good. 

Man cannot be and could not possibly 
have been created good. He could, if it 
had been worth while, have been made a 
wonderful automaton which would go 

13 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

through the motions of goodness; but in 
that case his acts would have been quite de- 
void of moral quality. Goodness by its 
very nature has the implication of a choice, 
of a free choice. A good man is good because 
he did not have to be good but desired to be 
so. So the very existence of real goodness 
demands the existence of at least a possibil- 
ity of refusing it — a possibility, that is, of 
evil. God could not make men able to be 
good, did He not also make them able to be 
bad. 

Man, moreover, in the exercise of freedom, 
has the power not only to refuse goodness 
but to use what is properly and in intention 
good for evil ends. Nothing exists in the 
material universe or in human nature which 
was not meant to serve some useful purpose. 
Thus the instinct of self-preservation is a 
necessary faculty that men may continue 
to live; but, turned to selfishness, it be- 
comes the root of every evil. Thus again the 

14 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

physical and spiritual need of man for woman 
and of woman for man was meant to be the 
basis of the greatest happiness the human 
race can know; yet has been made a source 
of horror and disease. It is no fault of God's 
that this is so. From Him comes never any- 
thing but goodness, which men in their 
selfishness pervert and desecrate. Man alone 
is to blame for all the moral evil in the 
universe. 

Some may still ask, "Why could not God 
have made men different?" Because to have 
made them different would have robbed 
them of the one gift which is higher than 
goodness, since it is the basis not alone of 
goodness but of manhood, individuality. 
That is freedom, which is God's supreme 
gift to men and angels — freedom to be as 
good and wise as they desire and to grow 
more so to eternity, or to refuse all goodness 
and all wisdom. Freedom not only is God's 
supreme gift to men, but is the one thing 

IS 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD ? 

which, in all His infinite relationships, He 
guards most closely. That is the reason why 
God cannot intervene to stop the evils and 
abuses of this world. That is the reason why 
He did not stop the War. If men are to be 
men and not automata, they must be left, 
both individually and collectively, to make 
themselves the kind of world that they de- 
sire. If, in their madness, they desire to 
make themselves a little hell, God can do 
nothing more than love and pity them. In 
this sense Mr. H. G. Wells is right in saying 
that God is not omnipotent. He has set up 
a universe in which all the natural and moral 
forces work for righteousness; He stands 
ready at every moment to throw the whole 
force of His being into every struggle for the 
right; but He can never and will never take 
away the freedom He has given us. 

There are few words, indeed, which have 
been more misunderstood than has "omnip- 
otence." It has for centuries been taken 
16 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

to imply the power to do what is essentially 
impossible. Thus the medieval schoolmen 
wrangled over God's ability to make a 
yardstick with one end. But the ability 
to create a contradiction is no true sign of 
omnipotence. Power thus applied would 
simply destroy itself. For God to attempt, 
for instance, to make a man free and not 
free would be to take away all meaning from 
the word "freedom," and all reason and 
sanity from the universe. God cannot act 
in a way contrary to "the nature of things" 
because the nature of things is fundamentally 
His own nature. His omnipotence consists 
in His unlimited ability to work wisely for 
the fulfilment of His own good purposes. 
It is not an independent attribute, but a 
quality of the Divine Love and the Divine 
Wisdom. 

But the most important phase of our 
great subject is still to be dealt with. What 
we have so far said of God has been in ab- 

17 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

stract terms. We have talked of His love 
and wisdom, of His power, and so on. At 
the same time we first of all described Him 
as a Person. Can we, so to speak, know Him 
personally? Is there a real and individual 
relation with Him into which, in some way, 
we can enter? If there is not, a mere theo- 
retical understanding of Him is of little 
value, and theology becomes a science just 
about as abstract as astronomy. 

God as Infinite Love and Wisdom is, by 
His very nature, absolutely and forever 
beyond our reach. Infinity, even in its 
lowest, mathematical sense, is something 
which the finite mind can talk about, can 
postulate, but which never can have a real 
and concrete meaning to it. This was what 
the apostle meant who said, "No man hath 
seen God at any time." But he said also, 
"The only begotten Son, which is in the 
bosom of the Father, he hath brought him 
forth to view." God as He is in Himself 
18 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

could never really have been known to us; 
but for that very reason He has manifested 
Himself to us in our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Here is the very centre and core of the New 
Christianity — the acknowledgment that 
in Jesus all God's infinite love and wisdom 
were forever made accessible to all mankind. 
If we desire to know what sort of person 
God is, we may find our answer in the life 
and personality of Christ. As Paul said, 
"God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself." 

Now I admit that the fact that God was 
in Christ, or that Christ was God, cannot 
be proved by ordinary scientific reasoning. 
It is not the sort of thing that could be 
proved in any case. Who can prove, for ex- 
ample, that the symphonies of Beethoven are 
beautiful? One must first feel their beauty, 
and may then, if he wishes, analyse the rea- 
sons for it — may, by studying the laws of 
harmony and counterpoint, come to an un- 

19 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

derstanding of the way in which the beauty 
was achieved. It is so with the deity of 
Jesus Christ. One must first feel it — as 
good men and women have so powerfully 
felt it from the time He walked on earth — 
and may then try to analyse or to account 
for it as best he can. Only, let us not lose 
our sense of the great fact because the ex- 
planation of it sometimes seems to be beyond 
our powers. 

There are so many Christians at the present 
day whose mental attitude might be ex- 
pressed as: "Christ must somehow have 
been divine; and yet, how could He be?" 
Happily for the world's future, this is not 
as nearly an unanswerable question as it 
first appears. The answer to it, may, indeed, 
be found in Christ's own words, if we will 
study them intelligently. We know that 
He called Himself "the Son of God," and 
also "the Son of Man." He spoke of God 
sometimes as one afar off who could "for- 
20 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

sake" Him, and at other times as His own 
inner nature. ("I and the Father are one.") 
Nor did He mean by this to imply simply 
the sort of union with Divinity which any 
human being might achieve. He quite def- 
initely set Himself apart from other men, 
calling Himself their "Lord and Master." 1 
What He meant was that in this world 
He had a dual nature, of which one part was 
Divine and an inheritance from God Himself, 
the other human and inherited from Mary. 
All His life on earth was in fact one long 
struggle between these two natures, in which 
the Divine eventually won a complete vic- 
tory. But in this struggle God the Creator 
met, as He could not have met in any other 
way, the life conditions of His creatures, 
and through it He could make known to 
them forever how His purpose was that hu- 
man life be lived. His purpose was that 

x For a fuller treatment of this subject, see the author's 
pamphlet, " Son of God and Son of Man." 

21 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

"Word" which "was in the beginning"; 
its embodiment in Jesus was "the Word 
made flesh." Jesus was thus the character 
of God Almighty, stated in human terms. 
He was, as someone lately has so beautifully 
called Him, "all of God that we can ever 
know." 

"In Him," as Paul said again, "dwelleth 
all the fulness of the Godhead, bodily." 
All that our highest intuitions recognize at 
once as Godlike, all that our reason teaches 
us to look for in the Source of every good, 
we find in Jesus, and in Him alone of all who 
ever trod the earth. God's love inspired 
Him; God's truth spoke through His lips; 
God's power operates on men through the 
unending, ever-growing influence of His Di- 
vine Personality. In Him, as He Himself 
said, we may see God, and through Him 
come in touch with God. For the Chris- 
tianity which will endure all earthly changes, 
Jesus Christ and He alone must be the 
22 



WHO — OR WHAT — IS GOD? 

source of all inspiration, the recipient of 
every word of prayer and praise, the one 
final example of each would-be Chris- 
tian's daily living. The new Christianity can 
be summed up in a single word, and that is, 
Christ! 



23 



n 

CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

And God spake all these words, say- 
ing .... (Ex. xx, i.) 

The words that I speak unto you, they 
are spirit, and they are life. (John 
vi, 63.) 

THE concept of a literal, verbal revela- 
tion of Divine Truth to mankind has 
been fundamental to Christian thinking, in 
the Protestant Church especially, until com- 
paratively recent times. During the whole 
of what we spoke of as the period of author- 
ity, the Holy Bible was regarded as directly 
inspired by God and as, in consequence, in- 
fallible. Any belief or dogma that could 
plausibly be based upon a text of Scripture 
was thereby regarded as not only beyond 
question but even beyond rational examina- 
tion. Truth was, in fact, conceived as some- 
24 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

thing higher than reason and not necessarily 
accessible to it, while Divine Authority was 
the one and proper basis of belief. 

But, with the recent downfall of the idea of 
authority in political and social matters, there 
has come also a decided weakening in ad- 
herence to Divine Authority, in this sense 
at least. Men have, for one thing, come to 
to see quite clearly that no "act of faith" can 
make a person really believe what he does 
not understand. The idea that it could is, 
indeed, patently absurd. A child, for in- 
stance, could quite easily be made to say, 
upon parental authority, that he believed 
in the binomial theorem, but unless he had 
studied algebra his belief would have no 
no real significance. Just so, it is now real- 
ized, one might say that he believed in the 
vicarious atonement; but the practical value 
of his belief would depend absolutely on the 
degree to which that doctrine held a defi- 
nite meaning in his mind. It is true that 

25 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

in either case one might say, " So and so, who 
is a wiser man than I, says that this is true, 
so I will assume it is true until I know the 
contrary." That may be a useful attitude 
in certain instances, but it is not belief. 
Belief does not rest on authority, even 
Divine Authority, but on the individual 
mind's ability to understand the truth and 
recognize it as such. 

Seeing this, men have made in the last 
few years an earnest effort to understand 
the Bible, and that very effort has had the 
effect of lessening belief in the Book's lit- 
eral infallibility. No honest and impartial 
reader can deny that it is full of inaccura- 
cies and contradictions; and its apparent 
moral standard, even, is not always up to 
present day requirements. Furthermore, we 
have no recent, scientifically accredited in- 
stance of God's speaking with men in such a 
way as the " inspiration" of the Bible was 
once thought to imply, and the whole con- 
26 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

cept of the " miraculous" has been pretty 
well eliminated from modern thinking. How, 
it is said, can God, who is the source of law, 
be thought of as occasionally violating the 
very laws which He Himself has made? 
So, while most Christians still assert that 
they believe in " the inspiration of the Bible, " 
what they have in mind is not the old idea 
of actual Divine Revelation, but a Divine 
enlightenment of the Bible writers differing 
in degree but not in kind from that of any 
earnest, spiritually minded man. 

Is this to be the final verdict in the matter? 
Certainly it does not harmonize with what 
the Bible claims about itself. For while the 
Bible nowhere claims a literal infallibility, 
it does claim, in many places, to contain 
the literal words of the Almighty. "God 
spake all these words, saying. . . ." "The 
word of the Lord came unto me, saying . . . " 
These are not isolated statements, but occur 
repeatedly. Are we to regard them simply 
27 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

as the unconscious over-statement of a super- 
stitious enthusiast, who puts the substance 
of his dreams or of his intuitions into the 
mouth of God; or have they such a rea- 
sonable basis in fact that we may still accept 
them literally? Can God speak with men? 

In the last chapter we spoke of God as 
omnipotent, but saw that His omnipotence 
does not involve the ability to act un- 
reasonably or in violation of His own laws. 
We should say, therefore, that God cer- 
tainly can speak with men, provided, first, 
that there is a good and sufficient reason 
for His doing so, and second, that it can be 
done without the violation of natural or 
spiritual law. If we can find that these 
two conditions exist, or have existed, then 
the existence of concrete Divine Revelation 
ceases to be either impossible or unreason- 
able. 

Why, then, should God desire to speak 
with men? As a rule, we know it seems to be 
28 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

His policy not only to leave men in freedom 
but to do nothing for them that they can do 
for themselves. Thus the human infant, 
with its infinite capacity for learning, 
comes into the world with less inborn, 
instinctive knowledge than is possessed by 
any other living creature. Thus, again, 
God never has revealed to us any of the facts 
of natural science. He never told us that the 
earth was round, or that steam and elec- 
tricity might be used for power. But if, 
on the other hand, there are facts which no 
human study or ingenuity ever could find 
out, and if, moreover, these are facts which 
it is vitally important that we should know, 
would there not be a valid reason why He 
should reveal these facts to us? This, I 
confidently believe, is just the case. 

Take, as a supreme instance, the great 

fact of God's own existence. One of the 

strongest and most valid proofs of God's 

existence, so the philosophers tell us, is the 

29 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

fact that the idea of God exists in the human 
mind. For, they assert, the mind of man 
is not so constituted as to be able to origi- 
nate ideas entirely foreign to its own ex- 
perience. In the strict sense, indeed, the 
mind of man cannot originate anything. 
It can only develope and expand such ideas 
as come to it from the outside. If, therefore, 
the idea of God exists, it must be that it has 
a basis in reality, and, indeed, in actual ex- 
perience. 

True enough; but in what kind of expe- 
rience? Nothing in our ordinary lives from 
day to day would lead us, in and of itself, 
to a belief in God. He is not evident to 
any of our senses, and, if He is the spirit- 
ual Being we conceive Him, never can be. 
It has been suggested that the idea of God 
originated in man's wonder at great nat- 
ural phenomena, such as thunder, wind, and 
so on, but this gives our primitive ancestors 
credit for tremendous powers of construc- 

3° 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

tive, abstract thinking. Is it not, really, 
far more reasonable to suppose that the 
idea of God exists in the mind of man be- 
cause God Himself put it there, and put it 
there by definite, concrete revelation of 
Himself? It never can be proved, at any rate, 
and I for one do not believe, that there is 
anything in nature to lead man to imagine 
the existence of the supernatural. 

Does it not, therefore, seem to be a prob- 
ability that God always has revealed Him- 
self to man, from the beginning? As to His 
methods in the times we know as prehistoric, 
we have little basis for assertion. It is inter- 
esting, however, to compare Swedenborg's 
statement that there was once an " Ancient 
Word" which was spread over a large part 
of the world with what ethnologists have 
since discovered as to the similarities in the 
mythology of races half a world apart and 
having no historical connection with one 
another. 

3i 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

"But," you may say, "even though God 
had a good reason for revealing Himself to 
men, would not His doing so have involved 
a violation of the laws of ordinary human 
experience? It would at least have had to 
be a supernatural affair, and there is no 
scientific evidence of the existence of the 
supernatural." Here one must simply ask 
the question, "What is scientific evidence?" 
Is not Sir Oliver Lodge a scientist? Of those 
scientific men who have attempted an open- 
minded study of the subject, have not at 
least a good proportion come to the con- 
clusion that the existence of the supernat- 
ural can be proved, and that phenomena of 
a non-physical origin are produced under cer- 
tain conditions? That the results of present 
day communications with the spirit world 
are for the most part very unsatisfactory has 
no bearing on the reality of the communi- 
cations. But of that, more in what follows. 
Our point now is that there are "natural 
32 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

laws" —if we want to call them that — 
under which it would be possible for God 
to speak with men if He chose to do so. 
For Him to do so would involve no change 
in the constitution of the universe, even as 
we now know it. 

If we admit, then, that God had a reason 
for speaking with men, and that He could do 
so, the next question must be as to the form 
which His speech, or revelation of Himself, 
would take. How would God speak? 

Assuredly in our language, since we could 
understand no other. And when I say " our 
language," I do not, of course, mean any 
particular tongue, but rather the body of hu- 
man concepts and ideas upon which, with 
some incidental variations, all our languages 
are based. In other words, God must express 
Himself to man in terms of human thought. 
Now a main characteristic of human thought 
is that it almost always tends, unconscious- 
ly or consciously, to clothe itself in symbols. 

33 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

Purely abstract thinking is impossible ex- 
cept to a limited degree and for a very 
limited time. Indeed, the gift of thinking 
abstractly at all has come comparatively late 
in human evolution. Even today there exist 
people 1 who cannot think of abstract qualities 
as such. Their language has no adjectives. 
When they want to say a thing is hard, they 
say it is "like a stone, " when round, it is "like 
the moon," and so on. (See White, "Mecha- 
nisms of Character Formation," p. 84.) 
Most of our own words for abstract qualities 
have at least their origin in a like material 
symbolism. Thus we speak of "high" mo- 
tives, a "warm" heart, a "clear" idea, a 
"keen" perception, a "cogent" (holding- 
together) argument, and so on. Instances 
might be piled up indefinitely. In most 
of these cases we have almost ceased to be 
conscious of employing a symbol, and in 
some we are entirely so. We do not stop 

1 The Tasmanian aborigines. 

34 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

to think, when we call a man "assiduous," 
that we really mean he sits right down to 
his work, but that is what the word means, 
nevertheless. Small wonder that the study 
of symbolism is becoming one of the central 
elements in the new psychology. 

Where does this universal tendency to 
make use of symbols come from? It is a 
thing to which we have grown so accustomed 
that we seldom think of it, but it must have 
an origin somewhere. For Emanuel Sweden- 
borg, whose study of the subject even mod- 
ern scientists have not yet caught up with, 
it rests in the very nature of things. It is to 
him, in fact, the explanation of the ancient 
problem of the relation between mind and 
matter. Matter, he says, is but the outward 
symbol and expression of mind, or spirit. 
Each material object is the sensible ana- 
logue, or " correspondence," of a spiritual 
quality. Each, in its sphere, performs a 
function similar to that of the other. As 

35 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

love warms the soul, heat warms the body. 
As an argument is based upon a solid fact, a 
house is founded on a rock. This is not to 
say that matter has no real existence, or 
that its facts and laws can safely be ignored; 
simply that matter, with its facts and laws, 
exists from and because of spirit, from which 
it took its origin. The natural universe in- 
deed exists, but it does so because there 
is a spiritual universe, of which it is the 
outward, visible and sensible manifestation. 
It is from his ancestral consciousness of 
this close relationship between matter and 
spirit that a man takes so naturally to the 
use of symbols. That, being ignorant of the 
law on which they should be based, he fre- 
quently misuses them, does not affect the 
fact. It is the fact of symbolism or corre- 
spondence that has made it possible for God 
to reveal His infinite and spiritual ideas to 
man. It is in terms of symbolism that the 
Holy Bible, which is God's one complete 
36 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

revelation of Himself to man, is written in 
every part; and because of this it is possible 
for what is apparently a very human, fallible 
book to be Divine in character and infinite 
in meaning. 

I know only too well how strangely such 
a statement falls upon the modern ear. The 
idea of a symbolic interpretation of the Scrip- 
tures is no new one — it is at least as old as 
Origen — and has been, in the minds of mod- 
ern scholars, quite conclusively discredited. 
But the trouble with the old attempts at 
symbolic interpretation was that they had 
no scientific basis. Exegesis was a simple 
matter of intuition. If one man said that 
a certain symbol meant one thing and an- 
other, another, neither could prove the other 
wrong or himself right. What Sweden- 
borg calls the " science of correspondences" 
leaves no room for guess work, since it 
deals with a symbolism based upon the very 
nature of things. Light can mean nothing 

37 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

but truth because it is the one material em- 
bodiment of that by which the soul sees. 

How could a book which had no more than 
a literal, surface meaning properly be or be 
called Divine? It would, indeed, inevi- 
tably grow out of date, as some men think 
the Bible has. While there are certain fun- 
damental human interests which remain 
the same from age to age — love, conflict, 
sacrifice, and so on, for example — still the 
forms in which these clothe themselves 
change so completely as in time to rob the 
noblest ancient treatment of them of direct 
appeal. Considering the two things in 
themselves, who would not rather read of 
the World War than of the wars of Israel? 
It is only as we learn to see in Israel a 
Divinely chosen symbol of all struggling 
humanity that her history assumes a mean- 
ing which can never lose its power. And 
till the world comes to recognize her and 
the other figures of the Bible history as sym- 
38 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

bols, God's Word never will again possess 
the power over men that it once had. With 
a symbolic understanding of the Bible, 
all its superficial imperfections and inaccu- 
racies drop out of sight. The story of the 
Creation may not harmonize with known 
facts of geology, but is perfect as a history of 
the growth of the human soul. Even a seem- 
ingly barbaric statement like the Psalmist's 
curse on Babylon, "Happy he. that taketh 
and dasheth thy little ones against the 
stones" (Ps. cxxxvii, 9), takes on a wholly 
new aspect when we realize that the " little 
ones " in question are the beginnings of evil 
passion, and that the " stones " are the solid 
facts of God's Commandments. 

It is, of course, impossible in the brief 
space of time at our disposal to give any real 
idea of how the science of correspondences 
opens up the inner meaning of the Word of 
God — how, to take just one more example, 
the account of the first three kings of Israel 

39 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

describes the growth of reason in the ado- 
lescent mind, and so on. I can but urge 
whoever may be interested to a further study 
of the subject, on which there exists today 
quite a considerable literature in addition 
to the works of Swedenborg himself. I will, 
however, venture one assertion. If there is 
any passage in the Scripture which the science 
of correspondences cannot unravel,, or if in 
any instance it is found necessary for the 
purpose of interpretation to depart from the 
basic law which has already been stated 
(that is, the law of an exact analog}' between 
the spiritual and the natural), then all that 
has been said will be discredited. I say that 
no such case ever has been found, or ever 
will be. The proof of the key is that it fits 
the lock; and if you do not believe me, by 
it for yourself. 

One objection which is often made to such 
a symbolic interpretation of the Bible as I 
have tried to outline is that it tends to take 
40 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

away from men the Bible that they have 
already — that by " explaining away" the 
Scripture's literal meaning it tends rather 
away from real faith in the Bible than to- 
ward it. This is simply not the case. The 
science of correspondences leaves the letter 
of the Bible as just what it is today — the 
Divinely guided utterance of the noblest 
thoughts and highest inspirations that have 
ever come to men. God did indeed speak 
to men through the immortal letter of His 
Word. The sayings that are put into His 
mouth are actually His sayings, the Com- 
mandments His eternal laws. At each stage 
of men's development He told them literally 
and directly just as much of His truth as they 
were then able and ready to receive. More 
than this He did not, in the literal sense, 
attempt, because there would have been no 
use in doing so. In all external matters — 
matters of science, sociology, even of outward 
morals — He made use of the conceptions 

4i 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

which were already in men's minds. From 
their then point of view, He told them the 
next good thing that they should attempt; 
and this is why the moral standard of the 
Bible is so obviously higher at the end than 
at the beginning. But within all that was 
said to certain men at a certain time, He hid 
a message to all men in all time. Within the 
letter which, by itself, "killeth," He put the 
spirit which "giveth life." 

So the apparent inaccuracies and contra- 
dictions of the Bible have, as I have said, 
no terrors for the spiritual student of it, for 
he realizes that it was not science or philo- 
sophy that God's Word was meant primarily 
to teach. Those parts of it which take the 
form of history are doubtless based upon 
historic fact — or at least on the view of 
fact held at the time when they were written 
— but the history is of secondary importance. 
What is important is that God chose these 
stories or these legends as a means of teach- 
42 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

ing all mankind His nature and His purposes. 
It is to know these and to see their applica- 
tion to our lives that we should read the 
Bible. 

You will perhaps have wondered how God 
ventured to conceal His message to man- 
kind in such a way, how He could know that 
it would not be overlooked. But the es- 
sential divine laws of human conduct are 
not such as needed to be veiled in any age, 
for, while their forms change, they do not. 
So in the Bible any honest man, though with 
no knowledge of the fact of symbolism, can 
find for himself the way of righteous living, 
and uncounted multitudes have found it there 
from the beginning. As it is so beautifully 
put by Swedenborg: "The Word in (the 
literal) sense is like a man clothed, whose 
face and hands are bare. All that concerns 
man's life, and so his salvation, is bare; the 
rest is clothed." The man who is content 
with the Bible as it is will find in it a full 

43 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN ? 

store of spiritual food; but for the man of 
the new age, of restless, questing, probing 
mind, there is in its symbolic, spiritual sense 
a treasure house whose stores he never can 
exhaust. 

I have sought all along rather to show 
how the Holy Bible can be the actual Word 
of God to men than to prove that it is such. 
This was of intention, since the nature of the 
Bible, like the Deity of Jesus Christ, is not a 
matter of proof so much as of intuition. If 
one can humbly and sincerely read the Bible 
without feeling — without knowing somehow 
in his heart of hearts — that it is different 
from and greater than all other books, there 
is not much that can be said to him. The 
supreme evidence that the Bible is Divine 
comes not from the outside, but from within 
itself. It will speak its own message to the 
listening soul far better than the feeble 
words of man can paraphrase it. All that 
a study of this kind can hope to do is to help 
44 



CAN GOD SPEAK WITH MEN? 

brush aside some of the intellectual difficul- 
ties which impede our hearing. By its own 
nature, by its formative effect upon two 
human civilizations, by its deathless message 
to the heart of every one who reads it, the 
Divine Book of Books will of itself proclaim 
and prove forever that, "The words that I 
speak unto you, they are spirit, and they 
are life." 



45 



in 

DO MEN DIE? 

Now, that the dead are raised, even 
Moses showed at the bush, when he 
called the Lord the God of Abraham, 
and the God of Isaac, and the God of 
Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, 
but of the living: for to him all are 
living. (Luke xx, 37, 38.) 

DO men die? There may be those to 
whom this seems an idle question. 
For there were days not long ago when death 
to many of us fell almost to a commonplace, 
when the results of war and pestilence 
made the "King of Terrors" only too fami- 
liar to us. Still I submit that nothing that 
we saw gives a real answer to the question, 
"Do men die?" We saw their bodies die, 
and, when the opportunity was offered, laid 
them reverently in the earth from which they 
46 



DO MEN DIE? 

came, but of what happened to the men 
themselves we could see nothing. For the 
time is past when thinking people could say 
of the few score pounds of animated dust 
that constitute a human body that they are 
a man. Even the scientists, who in their 
proper study of matter are a little apt to 
lose sight of the other phases of reality, are 
at last being forced to recognize that there 
is something in us which is immaterial. Two 
recent scientific statements are worth study- 
ing in this connection. Dr. Charles Basker- 
ville, a well known chemist, said in an inter- 



Though we know that the human brain works 
as the result of the action of material cells, there 
is something there that certainly is not material; 
something that cannot be explained on any purely 
material hypothesis. This is the mind, the spirit- 
ual part of man, no less real than the material, 
and, though dependent on the material for its 
power to express itself, far more important than 
the material. 

47 



DO MEN DIE? 

From quite a different point of view — 
that of the psychologist — M. A. G. Tansley 
comes to a similar conclusion. In his book, 
"The New Psychology in Its Relation to 
Life/' he says: 

Thought and emotion as we know them are 
absolutely sui generis and we do not get the least 
nearer to an understanding of them by believing 
(or, for that matter, disbelieving) that they are 
produced by brain processes. The nature of the 
connection which certainly exists is absolutely 
beyond our ken. We are thus driven to consider 
the psychic sphere separately from the physical 
sphere, as a distinct field for psychic investigation, 
with data, concepts and laws of its own. We 
must not mix up physiological and psychical terms 
as is often done by popular writers. Such a phrase, 
constantly met with in ordinary writing and speak- 
ing, as, a thought flashes through my brain, is 
quite illegitimate. Thoughts belong to the mind, 
not to the brain, by whatever changes in brain 
cells they may be accompanied. 

Each of these writers has, in his own way, 
seen that a body is not a man. A man has 
48 



DO MEN DIE ? 

a body, but he is something definitely and 
recognizably more. He is an individual, a 
personality, a soul, or, in the Biblical term, 
a spirit. "God is a spirit, ,, so the Master 
tells us, and as He made man in His own 
image, man must be a spirit too. 

When, therefore, we approach the ques- 
tion, "Do men die?" what we are really 
asking is whether the human spirit — the 
real man — is able to survive the dissolution 
of the body which has clothed it, and by 
means of which it has communicated with 
us and with the world. If, as Dr. Basker- 
ville puts it, the mind is "dependent on the 
material for its power to express itself," can 
it continue to exist when its material instru- 
ment is gone? 

Let it be understood, however, that what 
I am speaking of is the whole, individual 
spirit, and not just the spirit substance, if 
there be such a thing. I mean the whole 
man, with his memory, personality and con- 

49 



DO MEN DIE? 

sciousness, for all these make the man. Those 
who believe that there is such a thing as 
spirit — and to this class most present day 
philosophers unquestionably belong — will 
generally admit that it, like matter, must be 
indestructible; but there are many who in- 
cline to think that spirit, again like matter, 
may take different forms at different times, 
and that the spiritual substance which to- 
day goes to make up the soul of one man 
may in future times exist within that of an- 
other. If this be true, the answer to our 
question is affirmative. Men do die. For 
it is memory and individuality that make 
up a man as such, and if these perish, then 
it is the end of him. What is it to me that, 
after I am dead, the substance of my spirit 
is embodied in another? If I have lost my 
conscious personality and the sense of my 
own identity, then I am done for. A com- 
plete annihilation could be no worse. 
But what reason have I for believing that 

5o 



DO MEN DIE ? 

such will not be the case? Upon what ra- 
tional basis can there be set up a hope of 
individual immortality? 

That such a hope has held a place in human 
life as far back as we know about it, no one 
can deny. True, there have been and are 
exceptions, but a desire to live after death 
has been a typical human characteristic in 
all lands and times. Men have clung to the 
hope of immortality in the face of physical 
appearance with a desperate persistence 
which, if it be unjustified, we can surely call 
the most pathetic thing in all the world. 
There has been no way in which any new 
religion or philosophy could quite so cer- 
tainly attract a following as by some kind of 
teaching of a resurrection. As a mere matter 
of history, it was this element in Christian- 
ity which at first attracted to it the wide 
range of peoples out of whom the early 
Christian Church was formed. Civilized 
Greek and Roman joined with the painted 

5i 



DO MEN DIE? 

savages of Gaul and Britain in the worship 
of a Leader who was pictured to them as 
the Conqueror of death. And in its turn, 
the wide spread of Christianity bears its own 
witness to the historic truth of the Resurrec- 
tion story. 

It is said sometimes nowadays that the de- 
sire to live after death is but a natural out- 
growth of our selfish egoism — is in fact the 
logical corollary of the primitive "will to 
live." It may be this in part, but it is also 
very much more. Who that has ever really 
felt the call of a great work, what scientist, 
what artist, or what poet, but has felt the 
inadequacy of a single lifetime for the service 
to mankind he felt himself to be capable of 
rendering? Who that has known true friend- 
ship or a deep and enduring love has not 
felt that his emotion somehow must not have 
an end? If the desire for eternal life were 
but a selfish thing, we should expect to find 
those who have cherished it themselves in- 
52 



DO MEN DIE ? 

human, selfish, egotistical; but the fact is 
just the opposite. As one of our leading 
American essayists, Mr. E. S. Martin, puts it: 

In all times lives geared to that belief have 
usually been the better for it. It is the very main- 
spring of religion, the great warrant for resistance 
to materialism and the notion that to get all you 
can and enjoy it while you may is the end of human 
life. 

No, the "hope of everlasting life" is bound 
up with all that is noblest and most precious 
in existence. But that in itself is no proof 
that the hope is justified. Is there such 
proof? 

In the material sense, of course, there is 
not and there cannot be. What we have 
called the soul of man is by our very defini- 
tion of it immaterial, and its power to exist 
apart from matter is the thing that we are 
trying to establish. But if the soul exists 
apart from matter, then it obviously cannot 
reach us through our physical senses. Did 

53 



DO MEN DIE ? 

it ever, really? Even in this life we can 
neither see, hear, taste nor touch another's 
soul, and yet we are forced by reason to 
admit that it exists. By reason only can we 
know that it exists after the body dies. If 
we can know of immortality it must be 
through our minds, not through our senses. 
On the other hand, if immortality cannot be 
proved to sense, neither can sense disprove 
it. That matter exists no more proves that 
there can be nothing immaterial than a horse 
proves there can be no other animal. 

Properly the burden of proof should be 
put on those who deny immortality rather 
than on those who affirm it. Have we suffi- 
cient evidence of the body's effect on the 
soul to justify our thinking that the death 
of one destroys the other? If, by an accident, 
I lose a limb, I am not therefore any less my- 
self. Why should I think, then, that the loss 
of my whole body will be able to put an end 
to me? 

54 



DO MEN DIE? 

But, leaving temporarily aside the question 
of a possible Divine revelation on the sub- 
ject, there are two great natural laws which 
of themselves give evidence to any reasonable 
mind that death cannot affect the soul. 

One of these is the evident tendency of 
evolution to produce an increasingly com- 
plex universe. In the old days of purely 
theoretical philosophy it was supposed that 
unity and simplicity were the measure of 
perfection. Upon this basis many thought, 
as orientals still think, that the human spirit 
must at last be drawn back into the One 
from which it came. But the whole trend 
of evolution is in just the opposite direction. 
Everywhere the newer, higher forms are more 
elaborate and complex than their primitive 
forerunners. Every day the physical uni- 
verse becomes a little more diversified — 
tends to the production of more highly dif- 
ferent and specialized individuals. Can it 
be otherwise in the spiritual universe? Is 
55 



DO MEN DIE ? 

it not, on the contrary, most probable that 
the very tendency of spirit is to split itself 
into an ever-increasing number of individ- 
ual personalities, each of which shall not 
only exist permanently but grow ever more 
highly individualized? 

There is another natural law which gives 
us evidence of the soul's immortality — 
namely, that nothing normally dies till it has 
ceased to grow. The fruit tree springs up 
from a seedling, reaches its allotted size, 
bears fruit, provides through seed for future 
fruit trees, and then dies. It could have 
done no more, however long it might have 
lived. The wild animal grows up, acquires 
the instincts of its species, propagates and 
perishes. It would be no better and no wiser 
if it lived for centuries. Even the human 
body reaches physical perfection with matur- 
ity and instantly begins its lingering process 
of decay. Just of itself, it would be no more 
efficient as an instrument if it survived for- 
56 



DO MEN DIE? 

ever; for the various accomplishments which 
we habitually call physical dexterity are not 
actually in the body, but in the mind. If it 
were possible for the mind, say, of a pianist 
to be transferred to another body, he would 
need but a little muscular development to 
be able to play as well as ever. But when 
we come to the mind and soul of man — to 
man himself — we have a thing which is un- 
like any of those of which we have been 
speaking. A man never need stop growing — 
never does, in fact, except by his own lazi- 
ness. There are no known or imaginable 
limits to the powers of the human soul. Do 
you suppose that Shakespeare would have 
written no more plays if he had lived in 
physical vigor for another hundred years? 
Was Lincoln's power to impassion men for 
freedom limited by the assassin's bullet? 
Would he not have a message for today if he 
had lived and kept his faculties so long? To 
the man with a living, active mind each 

57 



DO MEN DIE? 

day opens new vistas, every hour reveals 
new interests, and his mental treasure only 
grows the richer with the passing of the years. 
Surely the soul of man must be immortal, 
since the very essence of it is eternal growth. 
But above all considerations of nature or 
of natural law, our faith in immortality 
must rest on our belief in nature's God. If 
God is, immortality must be, and if He is not 
it cannot be — for surely no material energy 
could produce an immortal soul. A God 
who made men only to wipe them out of 
existence after a few short and unsatisfying 
years of life — who planted in the breasts 
of men a hope He had no thought of realiz- 
ing — such would be no true God, but an 
unclean and cruel monster. For, say what 
one will of life in this world — and for many 
of us it can be a very splendid and inspiring 
thing — still when it is considered as a whole, 
with all its imperfections, disappointments, 
tragedies, frustrations, above all its utter 
58 



DO MEN DIE? 

incompleteness, it is meaningless without the 
hope of another life to follow it. Regarded 
as a training school, the world we know can 
be explained and understood; but in itself 
it is without coherence or significance. No 
wonder that materialistic thinkers have de- 
veloped a philosophy of "resignationism," 
that they say, "The answer to the riddle of 
the universe is that there is no answer." 
There is indeed no answer — but a life be- 
yond the grave. 

Again we say, "If God is, immortality 
must be." That the soul should perish at 
the end of earthly life would imply a Deity 
as stupid as He would be cruel. We have 
seen that the soul is, at the time of death, 
but on the threshold of its growth. If God 
should then decree its dissolution, it would 
be as though I should set out an orchard and, 
just as the trees began to blossom, cut them 
down. If no wise man would think of such 
a folly, how can God, the all-wise, even be 

59 



DO MEN DIE? 

imagined as permitting it? No! As surely 
as God lives, so surely will He sometime give 
us opportunity to use to the full the powers 
of growth and service with which he has en- 
dowed us. 

I have said that the soul's immortality 
could not possibly be proved to the material 
senses; but I did not mean by this that there 
can be no manifestation of the ultimate ex- 
istence to those who are still on earth. Such 
events have taken place repeatedly in human 
history, and may even, in a certain sense, 
take place today. They may seem, to those 
who do not understand them, to employ the 
physical senses, but they do not really do so. 
We have thought of the physical body with 
its senses as a thing distinct from the spirit, 
but sensation itself, though it makes use of 
physical organs, is a spiritual thing. The 
eye does not really see; it is seen through. 
The ear serves only as a sort of telephone by 
which the spirit hears. And since sensation 
60 



DO MEN DIE? 

is a quality of the spirit, and yet must have 
organs through which it can operate, it follows 
that the spirit must itself have organs, and a 
body to which they belong. As Paul says, 
"There is a natural body, and there is a spir- 
itual body." Furthermore, as conscious life 
is inconceivable except in an objective en- 
vironment, there must be a spiritual world, 
in which the spiritual body dwells. Yet, in- 
asmuch as time and space are qualities of 
matter, and a spiritual world can have no 
matter in it, therefore time and space cannot 
exist in that world, except in the minds of 
its inhabitants; and therefore also, we can- 
not say that the spiritual world is here or 
there, since it is actually everywhere. This 
is what Jesus meant when He said, "The 
kingdom of heaven is within you." For as 
the material world embraces all of matter, 
and all matter is in the material world, just 
so the spiritual world embraces all of spirit, 
and our souls, being spirit, are in that world 
61 



DO MEN DIE? 

even now. All that takes place at death is 
that our consciousness, being deprived of the 
organs by which it is made aware of this 
world, turns to its spiritual senses and lives 
in the world of spirit. 

This process can, however, take place tem- 
porarily in certain cases before the time of 
death, and it is thus that manifestations of 
the spirit world to people here must be 
explained. The immaterial has not been 
" materialized," as some have thought; but 
men w T ho still lived in material bodies have 
had spiritual senses opened. Thus it was 
that all the supernatural apparitions took 
place which we read of in the Bible. Not 
in the land of Canaan but in the spiritual 
world, not with their physical but with 
their spiritual vision did such men as 
Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Manoah and so 
many others see "the angel of the Lord." 
Not with their physical eyes, indeed, did 
the disciples see the risen Lord Himself, 
62 



DO MEN DIE? 

for as the story shows the body in which 
He appeared to them was not a ma- 
terial one. (Did He not pass through the 
closed doors?) And to some partial opening 
of the spiritual senses must be credited all 
that is genuine in the so-called "psychic 
phenomena" to which men like Sir Oliver 
Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are giv- 
ing so much attention at the present day. 
There will be no real understanding of such 
phenomena till this fact is grasped. 

But while the results of modern spiritism, 
when intelligently understood, furnish an in- 
teresting confirmation of what may be learned 
from other sources, they are in themselves 
more apt than otherwise to be misleading, 
if not actually dangerous. Communications 
from a person whose identity we cannot 
know, and whose veracity we have no means 
of verifying, cannot in their very nature be 
of any great value; and this is but too evi- 
dent from most of the results that have been 

63 



DO MEN DIE? 

published. All that these really show is that 
the spirits in question have the power to read 
our minds, and that they tell us what we 
already think or want to think. (Take, for 
example, what the spirits told the Rev. Basil 
King, who is a Canadian, of the spiritual 
virtues of the Canadian people.) This is 
entirely in harmony with the Bible's teach- 
ing that communication with the spirit world 
is possible, but that it is dangerous except 
when it comes by Divine permission, and 
unsought. 

While the accounts in the Bible are and 
must be the basis of all positive knowledge 
in regard to the future life, there is one rela- 
tively modern case of spiritual illumination 
which is worthy of consideration by all 
thoughtful people, and especially because in 
all its details it is absolutely unique. I refer 
to the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, who 
claimed that he possessed from God the power 
of transferring his consciousness from the 
64 



DO MEN DIE ? 

natural to the spiritual world at will, and 
this for over thirty years. Nothing in litera- 
ture is at all comparable with his book, 
"Heaven and Hell, from Things Heard and 
Seen." Here was a man who, if he was not 
absolutely deluded, was in an entirely differ- 
ent situation from all "mediums" before or 
since. He was not at the mercy of the spirits, 
for he dwelt in their world consciously. He 
could talk with them face to face and in their 
own environment, and so could form a crit- 
ical estimate of them such as is impossible 
to others. Of the contrast between him and 
other " psychics," the late William Dean 
Ho wells said: 

There is, in fact, nothing in the things reported 
from Raymond [Sir Oliver Lodge's son] which 
may not be paralleled and amplified a thousand- 
fold from the Memorabilia of Swedenborg. His 
one work, " Heaven and Hell," is a storehouse 
of experiences and observations which, whether 
we allow them to be genuine or not, are still of an 
extent and variety which far transcend all sub- 

65 



DO MEN DIE? 

sequent communications. The things told by 
Raymond .... are the commonplaces of Sweden- 
borg's revelation and philosophy. Raymond's 
facts, if we may call his fragmentary and discon- 
nected responses so, with the struggles of the me- 
diums for intelligible statements, might all have 
been derived from the superabundant testimony 
of the books where every fact of a world neither 
unknown nor unknowable is so amply set down 
that curiosity is almost sated. 

Again he speaks of Swedenborg as writing 
with "such dignity as shall make the gibber- 
ish of the ordinary ' control' of the ordinary 
medium seem an affront to the human intel- 
ligence.' ' 

With a full consciousness of the stark in- 
credulity which such a claim as Swedenborg's 
is bound to arouse at the first hearing, I 
nevertheless dare to assert that an impar- 
tial study of his writings will lead almost any- 
one to conclude, as I have, that there is no 
explanation that will fit his case but that 
which he himself gives to it. If, as the 
66 



DO MEN DIE ? 

Savior said, the dead are living — notice He 
said, "are living" not "will live" at some 
future time — then it is only natural that God 
in His goodness should have given us some 
knowledge of the state in which they live. 
And in that very goodness is the test of every 
putative revelation. There is an old and 
cowardly saying that a thing is "too good to 
be true." But if our God is infinite goodness, 
then the better and more perfect any pic- 
ture of the destiny He has prepared for us, 
the more sure we may be of its truth. And 
if Emanuel Swedenborg's picture of eternal 
life in a real world, where every soul is given 
opportunity to develop to its fullest in the 
very surroundings which are most appro- 
priate to it, where God forces no man into 
heaven and condemns no man to hell, where 
"all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of 
good shall exist" — if, I say, such a picture 
strikes in the soul of each of us an echo of 
instinctive recognition, may we not dare to 
67 



DO MEN DIE ? 

say that here at last God has Himself given 
the full and final answer to our question, 
"Do men die?" 

How, indeed, can men die when God Him- 
self, as He was manifest in the flesh, gave 
His undying promise, "Because I live, ye 
shall live also"? 



68 



IV 

WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles 
exercise dominion over them, and they 
that are great exercise authority upon 
them; 

But it shall not be so among you: but who- 
soever will be great among you, let him 
be your minister; 

And whosoever will be chief among you, 
let him be your servant: 

Even as the Son of man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and 
to give his life a ransom for many. 
(St. Matt, xx, 25-29.) 

THE word "religion" comes to us from 
the Latin, and is presumably derived 
from the roots re (back) and ligo (to tie or 
bind). The earliest historic concept of re- 
ligion, therefore, is that of a force which 
holds or ties men back from certain acts 
which they would otherwise perform. There 

69 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

has, however, also been in the word from the 
beginning the implication of a particular 
kind of force — the force of some sort of 
belief in the supernatural. Thus the full 
primitive conception of religion is a recogni- 
tion of the fact that certain things which we 
should otherwise desire to do may not be 
done because they are opposed to the will 
of some supernatural power. Supernatural 
power, however, is not a thing which prim- 
itive minds are capable of picturing abstractly 
or impersonally; therefore, what came to be 
the dominant thought in religion was that 
of the will of the gods. 

From this standpoint it is easily seen that 
the ethical character of a religion will depend 
on the view held as to the ethical standards 
of the gods themselves. If they are cruel, 
tyrannical or domineering, then religion will 
partake of the same character. Their es- 
sential attribute is not necessarily moral ex- 
cellence, but power, and it is their power 
70 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

which makes men's obedience to them the 
part of wisdom. Furthermore, their power 
and authority are things of which they may 
well be expected to be jealous, and accord- 
ingly the best way for a man to avoid their 
anger and to win their favor is by emphazing 
the difference between himself and them. 
He may do this in any one of several ways — 
by acts of worship, by a generally humble 
attitude, or, perhaps best of all, by one form 
or another of self-persecution. By giving up 
the things he likes to do, and even by inflict- 
ing physical injury upon himself or upon his 
family, he may be fairly sure of winning the 
divine favor. This is the typically pagan 
view of religion, which not only has existed 
in most of the religions of the past, but even 
at the present time and in Christianity it- 
self dies very hard indeed. 

The Jews were originally pagans, so that 
we may expect to find strong elements of 
paganism in their religious ideas — and this 

7i 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

although we believe that their religion itself 
was a veritable revelation from God. For 
it is impossible to put into a man's mind 
ideas which are entirely at variance with 
his previous conceptions, and it is equally 
impossible to give a man any ideas without 
their being modified by his previous con- 
ceptions and by his habits of thought. 
When, therefore, Divine Revelation first 
came to the Jews it had to be in a form 
not too much out of keeping with their 
earlier ideas — that is to say, it had to be a 
modified and slightly spiritualized paganism. 
Anything more than this they would have 
been as unable to grasp as a child would be 
to grasp the differential calculus. 

Hence primitive Judaism rejected human 
sacrifice and self-torture, but retained and 
even encouraged animal sacrifice. And there 
is little to indicate that the average Jew saw 
any special ethical meaning even in the Ten 
Commandments. These, along with the 
72 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

multifarious and wearisome observances of 
the ceremonial law, were to be obeyed, not 
primarily because they had a moral import- 
ance, but because Jehovah had commanded 
them and would sternly punish disobedience. 
This is not to say that no higher idea of 
religion ever existed among the Jews. On 
the contrary, the Divine effort to lead men 
to see God's law as a moral force is evident 
on every page of the Old Testament if one 
will look for it. In the later prophets es- 
pecially, the thought of God as the em- 
bodiment and source of righteousness — as 
one who will be satisfied with nothing less 
than a moral service from His people — the 
thought of religion as a Divine ethical sys- 
tem, is expressed with a force and eloquence 
never since surpassed. "The righteous God 
loveth righteousness." "Ye people, rend 
your hearts and not your garments." "The 
sacrifices of God are a broken heart: a broken 
and a contrite spirit, O Lord, thou wilt not 

73 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

despise." Such sayings as these are the im- 
perishable jewels of our spiritual heritage. 
But there is nothing in Jewish history to 
show that such a view of religion ever became 
popular. On the contrary, even in the Gospel 
times religion was still for the average Jew 
a measure of formal self-mortification prac- 
tised for reasons of immediate self-interest. 
Then, having failed to reach men through 
the written and spoken word, God made the 
Word flesh. He resorted to the force of liv- 
ing, personal example. He embodied His 
Divine nature in the human personality of 
Jesus Christ, so that that personality became 
and is forever Divine. This was the turning 
point in the world's religious history. What- 
ever wrong ideas men might have had as to 
the nature of God, they now need hold them 
no longer. God is Jesus Christ! And the 
conception of religion which, as Christ, He 
gave to men, was to their previous ideas as 
daylight is to darkness. Gone, in the teach- 
74 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

ing of Jesus, is the thought of God as a Di- 
vine Tyrant. He is revealed instead as the 
infinitely loving Father of all mankind, mak- 
ing His sun to rise on the evil and on the 
good, and sending rain on the just and on the 
unjust. Gone, too, is the thought that He 
can ever envy men their happiness, or need 
to be propitiated. If He gives men laws, it 
is not to restrict them, but that they may 
have life, and have it more abundantly. 
Again, and most important of all, the Savior 
taught that happiness itself is not to be 
attained by seeking it for oneself, but by 
trying to give it to others. The one real 
human eminence is eminence in service. Re- 
ligion henceforth was not to be a twofold re- 
lation — between a man and his God; but 
threefold — between God, man, and man's 
neighbor. 

I said the old, the pagan ideas of God were 
gone; rather I should have said they might 
have gone. For our Lord in His wisdom 

75 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

very clearly foresaw that a large part of 
what He taught was out of the mental reach 
of His contemporaries. Ages, He knew and 
said, would have to pass before the new 
heaven and new earth which He envisioned 
could actually come into being. Ages would 
have to pass before there should be in the 
world that intelligent recognition of Him and 
of His Gospel which He figuratively spoke of 
as His Second Coming. His predictions were 
entirely correct. No sooner were His fol- 
lowers away from conscious personal rela- 
tionship with Him than the old habits of 
thought with which they had been brought 
up began to reassert themselves. Christianity 
lost something of its distinctive character and 
began to be more or less Jewish. And then, 
as the new religion spread to other nations, 
each of these proceeded to graft upon it part 
of its own religious inheritance. Greece 
brought the dialectic machinery out of which 
Christian philosophy and theology were built. 

7 6 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

Rome made the Church an empire and a 
spiritual autocracy. Asia, before long, added 
her concept of asceticism and withdrawal 
from the world. 

So the old pagan idea of religion as an 
arbitrary restraint, a tying back, became a 
part of the accepted Christian tradition. By 
the fifth century a.d., monasticism had be- 
come a recognized institution of the Church 
— was even thought of as its highest em- 
bodiment. Simeon, called Stylites, who was 
seemingly one of the most selfish men who 
ever lived, had won his canonization by re- 
maining for half a century on the top of a 
pillar. And to this day the largest nominally 
Christian organization holds that self-pun- 
ishment is a virtue, and that the highest form 
of religion is to withdraw from contact with 
the world and even from its most sacred and 
inspiring ties. Protestantism, while abjuring 
many errors, still refused to accept Christ's 
teaching about religion. It still thought of 

77 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

it — and, in large measure, thinks of it to- 
day — as a restraint, a curb, a tying back of 
the spirit. So naturally the average man 
today thinks of the Church as the arch- 
enemy of freedom and of the joy of living. 
Is it not time that the real teaching of 
Jesus should be stripped of its pagan and 
oriental accretions and be seen at last in 
its true light? Is it not time that there 
should come into the world a new Chris- 
tianity — new, not in the sense of deny- 
ing anything that was genuine in the old, 
but as a fuller, freer and more spiritual in- 
terpretation of it? The new Christianity is 
here ! The evidences of it are on every hand. 
Everywhere men are turning away from 
the contentions of priests and theologians — 
turning away from arbitrary reasoning about 
Christ — turning back to the personality and 
teaching of Christ Himself. And this turn- 
ing — this realization that Christianity is 
Christ — is actually that mysterious and 

78 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

long-awaited Second Coming which the 
Savior prophesied when He was here on 
earth. 

The "New Church" exists as a society for 
the promotion of the new Christianity. It 
does not claim to have a monopoly of it; it 
delights to recognize it in all churches and 
in all lands; all that it asks is to do what it 
can to serve it. And yet I think it can be 
fairly shown that the new and true view of 
Christ's religious teaching was first set forth 
among men by Emanuel Swedenborg. This 
man had, it is true, strange psychic ex- 
periences; he claimed to reveal to men from 
personal experience the nature of the life 
after death ; but this was not at any time his 
chief concern. The real aim toward which 
his life and all his efforts were directed was 
to set before men a new and higher standard 
of Christian living — as he called it, a "true 
Christian religion.' ' In his writings we find 
for almost the first time since the Savior 

79 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

walked the earth, a conception of religion 
which is radically different from the pagan 
one. He saw religion as Christ saw it — 
rather, he saw Christ's vision of religion — 
not as a matter of mere theory and belief, 
not even primarily as a matter of not doing 
things, but as a matter of doing things. His 
most fundamental teaching was that "all 
religion is a matter of life, and the life of re- 
ligion is to do good." 

Searching the gospels for the keynote of 
Christian living, he found it, as the world in 
general is finding it today, in that momentous 
saying, "I am among you as he that serveth." 
So long as men thought of themselves as iso- 
lated human units, it was possible to think of 
religion as a matter between each man and his 
God. But if, as our Lord taught, humanity 
is a spiritual whole, if all men are branches 
of one vine, are children of one Heavenly 
Father, a new factor necessarily enters in. 
God's chief purpose in creation is not the 
80 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

well-being of individuals as such, but that of 
the race. And so the only true way to serve 
God is to do what we can to carry out His 
purpose — that is to say, to serve mankind. 
This, then, is the essential answer to the 
question, "What is the religious life?" It 
is the useful life — the life of service. There 
are few thinking men or women who would 
now question this statement, though when 
Swedenborg first made it, something like a 
century and a half ago, it was thought revo- 
lutionary and heretical to the last degree. 
And even now it needs to be defined. " Ser- 
vice" is coming to be more or less a catch- 
word, which people use with but little thought 
of its meaning. Do not many of us instinct- 
ively think of a life of service as meaning 
a life in some way exceptional — that of a 
minister, perhaps, or of a physician, or a 
welfare worker, or some kind of a public ser- 
vant. These, indeed, may be useful lives, 
each in its own way, but they involve only 
81 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

a small part of the sum total of possible ser- 
vice to humanity. 

In the first place, only a few of us are fitted 
by nature and disposition for this kind of 
occupations, nor would the world be better 
off if it were otherwise. Let us admit and 
emphasize that the spiritual element in man's 
life is the supremely important factor in his 
existence. If this is neglected or abused, all 
the rest counts for nothing. On the other 
hand, God, in His infinite wisdom, has put 
us in a world in which the major portion of 
our time and conscious thought must, in the 
nature of things, be devoted to material con- 
siderations. Unless most people gave the 
larger portion of their energies to the provi- 
sion of food, comfort and shelter, there would 
not be enough of these things to go around. 
Nor is it difficult to see why it is well that this 
should be the case. The cultivation of moral 
and spiritual virtues, if too much consciously 
indulged in, is more apt to lead to self-con- 
82 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

sciousness and self-conceit than to a true 
success. Real character is developed mainly 
while we are not thinking about it. And for 
that reason, service to the material welfare 
of our neighbors is as true a field of religion 
as any directly spiritual ministry. God has 
given to every man and woman a unique set 
of abilities and powers. There is one thing 
which each of us can do well — if not better 
than anyone else, at least much better than 
the average. It may be ministering directly 
to the souls' welfare of our neighbors; it may 
be helping to train their minds; it may be 
providing food or clothing or shelter for their 
bodies; or it may even be providing rest and 
recreation for them by amusing them. What 
it is, matters very little; the main thing is to 
find it out and do it to the best of our ability. 
The real vehicle of a man's religion is his 
Job! 

There are some interesting corollaries to 
this idea. For instance, the so-called " labor 

83 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

question " is now an important, vivid issue 
in the public mind — and certainly I have 
no thought of even trying to settle it. There 
is a feeling, however, which seems to underlie 
a good deal that is said and written on this 
subject, which, if our thought is true, will 
make a right solution of the problem un- 
attainable — I mean the feeling that work 
is an intrinsically evil or unpleasant thing. 
The question of how much a man ought to 
have to work is certainly debatable, and many 
men unquestionably have to work entirely 
too hard. The pay the worker should receive 
and the conditions under which he should 
live and labor offer enormous opportunities 
for clearer, fairer thinking. But if there 
is anything sure, it is that every human 
being ought to have some work to do, and 
that the deliberate idler is the most irreli- 
gious, as he is the most useless species of the 
genus humanum. There are but two sources 
of lasting human happiness — work, and love 
84 






WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

— and the man or woman who never learns 
to enjoy working at something he can do well 
misses one of the highest satisfactions that 
this life, or the next, affords. 

But if the man who will not work is irreli- 
gious, so is the man who works, or chooses 
his occupation, from a mere motive of self- 
interest. It is not Christian to pick out an 
occupation simply for the money one can 
make by it, and there are at least some nom- 
inally " respect able" occupations which will 
be abandoned when the world is really Chris- 
tianized. Nor is it religious to work at a use- 
ful occupation simply to get money or fame. 
These are poor ends at best — bubbles that 
break as we touch them, Dead Sea apples 
that turn to ashes in our mouths. There is 
only one ambition really worthy of a man 
made in God's image, and that is to leave 
the world a little better for his having lived 
in it. 

The useful life, however, involves more 

8S 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

than a good start and good intentions. It 
is not enough that we just find a job; we 
must proceed to make ourselves efficient at 
performing it. Real efficiency is a matter of 
training and education, but still more of 
character. And it is here that we trace the 
connection between the new idea of religion 
and the old; for character building is, in the 
beginning, a matter of self-restraint, of giv- 
ing things up. It is a different kind of self- 
restraint, however. The fact that a thing is 
pleasant does not necessarily put it under 
suspicion, nor is it ever God's reason for ask- 
ing us to abstain from it. Evil is evil be- 
cause it hampers our usefulness, and in so 
doing robs us of a part of our capacity to be 
as happy as God meant we should be. The 
new Christianity will give an even higher 
place to the Ten Commandments than did 
the old, because it will more clearly recognize 
the acts which they forbid as anti-social, and 
thus dangerous to the well-being, alike of 
86 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

society, and of the individual as a member 
of it. If a man ceases to be a useful citizen 
when he lies or steals or commits adultery, 
does he not also make the world a less desir- 
able place to live in, even for himself? Would 
not a country in which the Ten Laws were 
scrupulously kept by all the citizens be the 
sort of country in which each of us would like 
to find a home? 

For, as our Lord taught, the Command- 
ments are not arbitrary restrictions placed 
upon our happiness; they are the very laws 
of our own nature. He said, "The Sabbath 
was made for man, and not man for the Sab- 
bath," and He might well have said as much 
of every Divine law. The indulgences which 
God forbids sometimes appear on the sur- 
face as leading to happiness, but in fact they 
rob us of the chance of it. Take, for example, 
the promiscuous indulgence in sex relations. 
It is forbidden because, and only because, it 
inevitably tends to destroy in him who prac- 

87 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

tises it the capacity for the purest happiness 
the human heart can feel — the lasting love 
of one man and one woman. And so it is 
with all the rest of God's commands. 

Self-restraint, however, is but the begin- 
ning of the religious life. This is a positive 
and not a negative thing. The next stage is 
study and instruction. It is strange how men 
will recognize that it takes study to become 
a good carpenter or a good doctor, and yet 
feel that somehow one can be a good Chris- 
tian — which is the most important and most 
difficult thing of all — by instinct. The life 
of religion is to do good, but to do good a man 
must first know how. And so the theoreti- 
cal side of religion has a vital, if still a sub- 
ordinate, place. Sources of religious infor- 
mation are many and various, but they all 
come back to the one Divine fountain of 
spiritual truth, the Word of God. The man 
who is really and intelligently religious will 
read the Bible regularly, for he cannot get 
8S 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

along without it. Nor will he be satisfied 
with the mere reading. Knowing that other 
men read also, he will want to confer with 
them in order to get their interpretation of 
what he reads. He will want to get the in- 
terpretations of men trained in Bible study 
as an occupation, and this almost inevitably 
will lead him to the Church. There are, 
indeed, many religious men who do not go 
to church, but that is just a temporary con- 
dition for which people and the Church are 
both in part to blame. The Church will 
ultimately awake to its true character and 
mission, and religious men will ultimately 
realize their need of it. And in the mean 
time, if the Church is not the kind of thing 
we think it should be, we should not stand 
outside and criticize; we should get in and 
help. The government of our country will 
not be substantially improved so long as we 
persist in talking and thinking of it in the 
third person. It is not "they"; it is we — 

89 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE? 

you, I and our neighbors. And the Church 
is just the same. 

Deeper, however, than the need the man 
who tries to lead a useful life will feel of in- 
struction and of the Church — deeper than 
any other need, in fact — will be his need of 
God. One cannot serve mankind by mere 
force of determination, however strongly one 
may wish to do so. There are too many 
temptations in the way, and we ourselves 
are much too weak, too lazy and too self- 
indulgent. More and more the thoughtful 
people of the world — outside the churches 
just as much as in them — are beginning to 
see the need of real belief, not just in a God, 
but in a personal God. Such a book as Mr. 
Wells's "God the Invisible King" could not 
have been written by such a man unless the 
world had changed from what it used to be. 
We need not only to believe but actually to 
feel that in our efforts at well-doing God is 
with us. Lacking this inspiration, the very 
90 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

stoutest of us must eventually lose heart. 
But it can be attained — in many ways, but 
most of all through prayer. This is no theory, 
no self-deception; it is a fact of human ex- 
perience. The whole history of mankind 
shows nothing more clearly than that the 
right kind of a relation with God can give 
men strength to do what they would other- 
wise have been incapable of. And this is 
most true of all when God is recognized for 
what He is, the infinitely tender, loving, 
approachable, Divinely Human Being who 
came down to earth and lived our life as Je- 
sus Christ our Lord. 

What is the religious life? It is a life of 
daily service to men lived in a personal re- 
lationship with a personal God. Such a life 
has its difficulties, but they are healthy ones, 
and its rewards are above all computation. 
It is not narrow, but broad; not gloomy, 
but supremely happy. It forbids no really 
good thing, even in this world, while develop- 

9i 



WHAT IS THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ? 

ing, as they can be developed in no other way, 
the soul's capacities for eternal happiness in 
that life for which our brief adventure here 
is but a training and a preparation. May 
God grant us, every one, the courage and 
determination to set out on it! 



92 



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